Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, September 20, 2006

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On Tuesday September 19, 2006 a copy photo of a December 24, 2005 Christmas family snap shot of Elfriede Rinkel taken in Los Angeles. According to family members, Rinklel immigrated from Germany to the United states in 1959 and lived in San Francisco until she was deported back to Germany at 83-years-old after federal officials uncovered her past as a Nazi concentration camp guard. Her family claims they never knew anything about her past and believed she worked for a furrier in Germany during the war. Handout ** cq less

NAZI20_019_KW_.jpg
On Tuesday September 19, 2006 a copy photo of a December 24, 2005 Christmas family snap shot of Elfriede Rinkel taken in Los Angeles. According to family members, Rinklel immigrated from ... more

Those who knew San Francisco's Elfriede Rinkel never found it remarkable that the German immigrant would marry a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, or attend synagogue with him, or plan to be buried next to him at a cemetery run by a Chevra Kadisha, a Jewish burial society that performs ritual purification.

On Tuesday, though, came a jarring twist: The U.S. Justice Department said the 84-year-old Rinkel had been deported to Germany, nearly half a century after she emigrated to the United States, because she had been a guard at a Nazi concentration camp in World War II where an estimated 90,000 people, many of them Jews, were exterminated.

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"I think it may have been a type of atonement for her," her attorney, Alison Dixon, said of Elfriede's marriage to Fred Rinkel, who died two years ago. "My understanding is that she has also contributed to Jewish charities."

Dixon said Rinkel never told her husband that she had spent nearly a year as a guard at the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany, the only major Nazi camp for women.

She might not have told anyone in the United States -- including her brother and his wife, who dropped her off at San Francisco International Airport on Aug. 31. Rinkel told them she was returning to Germany because she was having problems with her apartment on Bush Street in downtown San Francisco. It wasn't until Tuesday that the couple learned the truth from reporters.

"I just don't have any words," said Rinkel's brother, an 82-year-old Berkeley resident who asked that his name be withheld because he is afraid of a possible backlash. "I don't have any feelings anymore. Life has given me too many things. I cannot accept it, let's just put it that way."

The government said Rinkel, a permanent resident alien who never applied for U.S. citizenship, had admitted after a two-year investigation that she had guarded female prisoners at Ravensbruck from June 1944 to April 1945, when the Nazis abandoned the camp to the advancing Allies. She now lives with her younger sister in the German city of Viersen, her brother said.

The Justice Department alleged that Rinkel had used attack dogs to march emaciated inmates to slave-labor sites. More than 130,000 women from dozens of countries -- Jews, Gypsies and others -- were brought to Ravensbruck during its six years of existence. More than two-thirds of them died of malnourishment, in medical experiments and in a gas chamber, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Rinkel is the first woman prosecuted by the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which was formed in 1979. The agency has won cases against 102 people who took part in Nazi persecution and has deported 62 of them.

Eli Rosenbaum, director of the office, would not say how the government found out about Rinkel. But he said staff historians have searched around the world for evidence such as rosters of Nazi guard units and mobile killing units, building a list of more than 70,000 names that are checked against immigration records and other documents.

"She was an integral part of the machinery of destruction and persecution at Ravensbruck," Rosenbaum said of Rinkel. "The message to would-be perpetrators of genocide and crimes against humanity is that if you dare to act on your fantasies of destruction, there is a real chance that what remains of the civilized world will pursue you for the rest of your life, even if you live for a very long time."

Attorney Dixon said Rinkel regretted her wartime actions. However, she added, "I was informed that it was not completely voluntary on her part. She answered a work ad. ... In Germany at that time, if you answered certain work ads and went to the interview and said you didn't want the job, they would put you in the camp yourself."

Rinkel admitted to the Justice Department's charges in part to avoid the publicity of a trial, Dixon said.

Rinkel's brother said he had fought in the German army and had been captured by U.S. forces in North Africa, and as a result he was in a prisoner-of-war at a camp in Wyoming when his sister allegedly worked at Ravensbruck. He emigrated to America in 1950 and nine years later petitioned for his sister to join him.

Rinkel soon met her future husband at an event for German Americans. They were a quiet couple and kept to themselves, her brother said.

Fred Rinkel, who grew up in a prominent family in Berlin, fled Germany with a brother as Nazi persecution of the Jews spread. He had trained to be an opera tenor in Germany, but after making his way to San Francisco he settled on a job as a singing waiter. Elfriede Rinkel worked as a furrier.

Fred Rinkel's past and Jewish heritage were important to him, according to those who knew him. He belonged to B'nai B'rith, one of the world's largest Jewish organizations.

He died of a heart attack Jan. 21, 2004, and was buried at the Eternal Home Cemetery in Colma. Elfriede Rinkel planned to be buried beside him, the cemetery said. It's not clear now whether that will still happen, although under an agreement with the Justice Department, she can be buried on U.S. soil.

An employee at Sinai Memorial Chapel, which owns the Colma cemetery, said those who met the Rinkels while they prepared for the end of their lives are in shock at the news.

"It's so easy to hate her and want to beat her up," said the employee, who asked that her name not be published. "But we were not there. We don't know what happened. Why did she marry a Jewish man? Maybe she loved him.

"The human soul is much more evil and good than it appears from the outside. There's a Russian expression that says you have to eat a kilogram of salt with someone before you begin to know them. There's just so much we don't know."